Martin Scorsese. The man, the myth, the light and the life, the man who has given face and shown us the shadow of the 20th century rags to riches American dream, who has embodied the Italo-American identity in the US, the man who tells the tale of the man who is seduced by the vices of life. The man who has been able to portray God as if he were best mate of man, the man who has given us the man Robert de Niro again and again and again, the man who makes two peni – which is my new way of saying the plural of penis – two peni talking to each other till eternity -fighting, screaming, stabbing hitting each other- that’s his thing.
Scorsese is a phenomenal filmmaker who is particularly good at telling one story which the one of the self-absorbed, Jesus-complex, money-driven man, and often times a pedophile suffocating from his own greatness. Many of his films are a slight variation of this tale taking place on a different New York street corner. Whether these men are gangsters, bankers, boxers or drivers, or a combination of these professions, the men, often also played by the same three people, show the danger of what may happen if you as a man completely give in to the temptations of the greatest manifestations of manhood.
Even though he tells the same story over and over again, he is quite genius at it. I don’t like them as much as I did before, as this particular story is becoming longer and longer and the men are becoming older and the action slower so I’ve slightly lost interest. However, I often go back to his older films. My personal favourite is the King of Comedy, a 1982 film with yes, Robert de Niro playing a delusional self-obsessed clown in New York, but the character has a sweet tenderness that you can really fall in love with. Now I think with these films, my personal aversion is not the peni, because Scorsese actually does a really great job in creating these characters, but it is more so that Scorsese feeds into a desire of his audience who have fallen in love with the lifestyle of this characters, and therefore I feel as if his films are wrongfully celebrated, as his critique on the lifestyles that his characters live are not always as clear. Too many of his films remain a celebration of vile living.
Anyways, alongside making peni films Scorsese is a true hero for founding the Film Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the film preservation and exhibition of restored and classic cinema. I have discovered so much beauty thanks to his initiative. Maybe I just don’t enjoy listening to peni talking for a long time.
My dad has this rotating bookcase-rack filled to the brim with pocket editions of these cheap dimestore novels you could buy in gas stations across post-war America. I’d browse through them and notice the pulpy titles and striking covers: Twisted Wives, Satan is a Woman, Girls Dormitory, Satan is a Lesbian… The list goes on. I was never really compelled to read them, but I did imagine how these trashy titles could play out as a film: stories of lust and jealousy, crime and betrayal, death and desire. Little did I know that this collection of books was also the home for some absolute bangers like The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon and The Postman Always Rings Twice, pulp novel staples I’d later become familiar with through their unforgettable film adaptations.
When I first started watching American Film Noir films, my dad’s dime store collection began to make sense as a reservoir for some of the best films ever made in the American Studio system. I could bond over these films with my dad, who loved American actors like Humphrey Bogart, James Cackney and James Dean. The strong and silent types as Tony Soprano used to call them. Then we watched Touch of Evil, Orson Welles genius answer to the American Film noir, and got even more obsessed about cinema together.
At film studies, I got to learn about the cinematic era that preceded what is now commonly known as the film noir. Our Professor Jim Hurley, who sadly passed away in 2014, gave a course on Weimar Cinema, about the period of filmmaking between the aftermath of World War I and the rise of Nazi Germany, which was the starting point of some of the best directors of the 20th century, including the one and only Fritz Lang, whose Dr Mabuse and M can be seen as some of the greatest anchor points for the Film Noir. Generally understood as urban drama’s and thrillers, film noir films are often labyrinth detective and crime drama’s about the moral trappings of life in the crushingly big city. These are paranoid films about the darker penchants of human nature, amplified by crime syndicates, state corruption and sexual tension. Sure, they can be pulpy, but in the hands of the right director, the cheap source material becomes a well of existential observations and deep reflection on human behaviour.
The best film noirs are drenched in an almost supernatural aura. It seems as if the characters are controlled by forces bigger than themselves. They’re steering towards impending doom and have no way of changing direction. This sinister vibe can be hypnotic, hallucinatory, intoxicating or even arousing. I can imagine why so many audiences flocked to these films and why so many directors tried to make them: it’s the stuff that movies are made of, packaged in audience-friendly formats.
I also understand why so many directors harken back to the film noir of yore, which begs the question: what even is a film noir anymore? with all the talk of neo-noir, and neo-neo-neo-noir, it’s hard to even define what a film noir even is. It’s for this very reason that Australian critic Adrian Martin says that Film Noirs have never existed as a genre per se, but only as a mode of production in a very specific time in the United States after World War II. I agree with him that the label Film Noir has become a kind of hollow container for a lot of films to be attached to, but at the same time it’s a useful way to describe the vibe of some of these unforgettably haunting and gripping films that are so delightfully twisted and fucked up while still playing for a mainstream audience. It’s maybe the cinephile compromise of the ages, a type of film that’s enjoyable for each and everyone.
And if you want to find out what this loose definition of the film noir is all about, you need to check out the LAB111 programme Tom compiled that brings together some of the very bests in the genre on the big screen. I think Tom has already talked about Nightmare Alley on this podcast, which is the inspiration for the programmes title: TALES FROM NIGHTMARE ALLEY, but there’s plenty of other cinematic goods to be found here, from The Killing by friend of the podcast Stanley Kubrick to the aforementioned A Touch of Evil by Orson Welles. But don’t miss out on Otto Premingers Laura, Michael Kurtiz’ Mildred Pierce and Jules Dassin’s Night and the City either.
Somewhere in my early high school years my classmates and I were instructed by our French teacher to read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s sweet little novella Le Petit Prince. For those unfamiliar to the book: the story follows a young prince who visits various planets in space, including Earth, and addresses themes of loneliness, friendship, love, and loss. On this interplanetary adventure he encounters a geographer who, after some insisting, tells him the definition of the French word ‘éphemere’ or, as the English would say, ‘ephemeral’. “It means,” says the geographer ‘that which is in danger of speedy disappearance.’” We would call it ‘fleeting’.
Ever since reading these passages at an early age ‘ephemere’ has remained my favourite word in the French vocabulary. It’s certainly a term that comes to mind when discussing the renaissance woman and idiosyncratic chameleon we will be talking about today, Tilda Swinton. The London-born actress returns in Joanna Hogg’s once again highly autobiographical sequel to her 2019 film The Souvenir as the mother of protagonist Julie, a struggling student filmmaker. Hogg’s shimmering story of first love (mostly depicted in Part I) and the struggles with a young woman’s formative years, is a portrait of the artist that transcends the halting particulars of everyday life — a singular mix of memoir and fantasy.
In it Swinton plays a woman somewhat years her senior, once again transforming into a character she is not, but surely seems to know quite well. That Julie is portrayed by her real life daughter Honor Swinton Byrne certainly helps.
What is it with Tilda Swinton? She has, to stay with the French vernacular, a certain je ne sais quoi. An ungraspable aura that lends itself to an almost bizarre variety of roles and performances. From her early works with friend and fellow artist Derek Jarman (Caravaggio, Wittgenstein and the amazing Blue) to collaborations with Sally Potter (Orlando), Spike Jonze (Adaptation), The Coen Bros. (Burn After Reading), David Fincher (The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button), Luca Guadagnino (Io Sono L’Amore, A Bigger Splash, Suspiria), Wes Anderson (Moonrise Kingdom), Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer), Lynne Ramsay (We Need To Talk About Kevin), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Memoria), the list goes on. Summing up her palmares one would think her focus lies mainly in the artistic, but let’s not forget she popped up in both the Narnia and Marvel universes… Few actors can navigate the balance between high and low brow, between light and heavy, Hollywood and arthouse, without ever being pigeonholed, as Swinton has been doing for almost fifty years.
So the question arises, what makes her so unique? What makes her stand out? And why, like the rose the Little Prince desperately wants to protect de Saint-Exupéry’s novel, does she seem so ‘éphemere’?
Lately I’ve been experiencing some particular pains in my right index finger, which might be a not so subtle hint that I’ve been using my smartphone a bit too much…
It’s also an indication that the human body can’t keep with all the technological innovations we throw at it. It would be quite convenient to simply grow a second thumb or a sixth, more general finger, but hey, there’s a reason it’s called Evolution buddy. For the good things to come, we need to be patient I guess…
Nonetheless, thinking about these kinds of things raises a lot of questions about the relationship between our bodies and the technology we invent. It’s not for nothing that the iconic media theorist Marshall McLuhan saw every kind of technology — which can be as broad as a kitchen knife, a pair of glasses or a smartphone — as an extension of men. It literally extends our capabilities to reach beyond the limitations of our own bodies and enter a kind of virtual world, enabled by the technology surrounding us.
As a matter of fact, the idea that media produced by our technology is only surrounding us is a naive fallacy, a product of a human-centered kind of thinking where we think we can still place ourselves outside of the society we have produced. “We are living inside the media,” is what professor Mark Deuze at the University of Amsterdam always hammered on. Try to think of it, when we consume news on COVID, the war in Ukraïne, or any other event in the world we simply go one layer deeper in a kind of reality we’re already part of. Technology is the conduit, the extension of us, to give us new insight, but it’s a plain reality we’re already in.
Nobody is able to translate these kind of reflections on the relationship between technology and the human consciousness as David Cronenberg, a Canadian director who emerged in the world of film with low budget body horror in the 1970s and then became one of the most iconic genre filmmakers with films like Videodrome, The Fly, ExistenZ and Crash that combine highly conceptual, critical theory with pulpy and bodily pleasures. His film are disturbing, erotic, violent and gorey, but also smart, generous, essayistic and simply a whole lot of fun.
Videodrome is his grand reflection on media and how the imagery we consume is not virtual, but a physical manifestation of our desires. It’s one of the most horny mainstream films I’ve ever seen, which is frankly also an important part of Cronenberg’s films. ExistenZ philosophises on the way new realities, made possible by the interconnectivity of the computer, are just as real as the level of physical reality we perceive as objective. It’s the natural companion piece that challenges the techno utopia of the Matrix because there’s never a breaking out of the 0s and 1s. All of it is just the same in the Cronenberg universe.
As this episode airs, Cronenberg’s latest film Crimes of the Future is playing in cinemas all over the world, including the Netherlands. For me it feels like a kind of coda to the philosophy of Cronenberg, a high concept, low fidelity science fiction film about the shared imperfections between the computers and the human body. If ExistenZ still promises a kind of escape in a new reality, Crimes of the Future is here to tell you that we’ll never reach it, because of all of these factors — the way we develop technology and apply it as an extension of ourselves — are essentially a political battlefield, where the utopists are on the losing side. Set in the impoverished city of Athens — once the symbol of European civilisation, and now the symbol of capitalist decay — Cronenberg has constructed a tantalising, political allegory in which the human body is desperately trying to catch up with technology, resulting in mysterious new organs that grow in people and need to be surgically removed so that the genetic material of the human stays human. Can we still speak of evolution or is this a literal revolution happening inside our bodies?
Cronenberg throws a lot of stuff at you, some of it fantastically gorey and some delightfully horny, but all of it is also quite pensive and reflective. Some of the imagery is quite extreme, but the style feels kind of detached and seemingly devoid of emotion. This is apparent in the unlikely acting style of Cronenberg’s muse Vigo Mortensen, who is absolutely great here, but not as compelling and enigmatic as he was in earlier work like A History of Violence, Eastern Promises or A Dangerous Method. His body, in which bizarre, new organs grow, is a literal site of art in the film, and his creative and erotic partner played by Leo Seydoux is the artist/performer who surgically removes these organs as part of their performance art, presented in concrete-like techno clubs.
Is it Long Live The New Flesh, as Videodrome iconically proclaimed, or something more sinister? And is the film such an instant classic as Videodrome and Existenz, or is this a lesser Cronenberg reflecting on his own career in the rearview?
One event that many of us film fanatics were especially excited about this winter, was the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s ninth feature film, Licorice Pizza. Paul Thomas Anderson, who’s such a 21st century icon that his name is often abbreviated to PTA, is a writer and director who has been in the limelight for showing the dark heart of humanity’s past and present since the 90’s. With Licorice Pizza, he may have made his most lighthearted and optimistic film to date. Even though the film does not contain the usual dark-heartedness and forceful aggressive vibe he is known for, he has again shown us what I personally find his strongest quality as a teller of tales, which is the truthfulness of portraying humans as human as they can be.
It is especially the human men from his films that give me life. Many protagonist-boys from PTA films remind me a lot of the men I used to find attractive when I was younger and easily impressionable. The men I fell for were easy talkers, masculine yet charming, successful, intelligent and authoritive. However, these are also the men that, the moment you’ve gotten attached to them, they turn into master manipulators, selfish, uncomfortably aggressive with a narcissistic cherry on top. Men, who, in the course of time, will eventually, always, choose for themselves. These are boys better known as fuckboys. PTA understands them like no other, and has been making us fall in love with them and telling their tales throughout his oeuvre.
However, PTA gives us much more than solely the fuckboy flavor. He introduces us to countless prototypes of people who are in the likelihood of people we may have met in our lives. He shows us characters suffering from deep sorrow, unbeatable addiction, extreme paranoia, powerful love and indestructible love, often played by his solid squad of stellar actors, oftentimes with sensational performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who’s sudden death 8 years ago we are remembering today on the day of our recording. Throughout the darkness, there is always one thing that PTA gives us to pull us out from human agony. He never forgets to make us dance. PTA films are musicals of the groovy.
Today, we will not discuss Licorice Pizza, or maybe we will for a bit, but I’d prefer to talk another stunning PTA film which came out in 1998, called Boogie Nights. Boogie Nights is a film that takes place in California in the 70’s: a story about the discovery of an upcoming porn actor, who goes by the name of Dirk Diggler. As we follow Dirk along on his way to fame, fortune, and hot girls, we get a deeper understanding of the ethos and pathos of old American porn business, of how social inequality manifests itself in darkest corners, but primarily, we get an insight of the struggles that come with being a boy with a big penis.
I think it’s a thing that we all have in common here, this insisten urge to plant yourself in the film theatre, get engulfed by a tremendous film and seemingly levitate out of your seat, into this sublime world of beauty and pathos.
It’s one of those inherent contradictions of cinema: how it forces you to be stil, rendered immobile in your seat, and how it can still move you, push you, pull you, letting you transcend this mortal plane into an ever-existing world of shadow and light…
Transcendence. Isn’t it the highest goal of cinema? To transcend the tight borders of the film frame and to open you up to a world you couldn’t imagine, envision or experience yourself?
If we consider the historical implications of the term Transcendence — of a nature or a power which is wholly independent of our material universe — the effect of it in cinema is nothing short of metaphysical, spiritual even. Meaning it’s a quality to a film that’s near unobtainable. I’d go even further and say that filmmakers that set out to reach a transcendental experience with their films will more often fail than succeed, as the path to obtaining this goal is something akin to reaching Nirvana in buddhism. There’s no formula for transcendence, no secret recipe that gives you the sublime.
And yet, there’s Paul Schrader…
Before the beloved screenwriter of undeniable classics like Taxi Driver and the prolific director of some of America’s finest films like American Gigolo, Hardcore, The Comfort of Strangers and more recently First Reformed wrote and directed films, he himself was working as a film critic under the auspices of the ever-influential Susan Sontag. Totally immersed in an artform that he wasn’t allowed to consume when he was a youngster with a strict orthodox Christian background, he attributed a spiritual quality to world cinema that many of his peers had missed.
Bringing together the films of Carl Theodor Dryer, Yasujirō Ozu and Robert Bresson he described in a book what he called transcendental style in film: a form of cinema that managed to reach a more spiritual plane by employing austere camerawork. acting devoid of self-consciousness and editing that editorial commentary. In short, these are directors who make films within a near-dogmatic frame and find within it the means to transcend their own limitations. Films that use the narrowing lense of the camera to look deeper inside and open up the medium.
The book managed to capture a quality to cinema that’s seemingly ungraspable. Instead of taking notes and reverse-engineering a recipe for a form of transcendental film, he managed to describe what inherent qualities these seemingly disparate filmmakers actually shared with each other. Something ephemeral, yet tangible, a reason to fall in love with the movies all over again, but each time maybe with a higher intensity.
The irony of the films of Paul Schrader is that he only emulates, or equals these qualities in his own films at very specific moments. To paraphrase one of the best jokes in The Sopranos; the cinema of Paul Schrader is spiritual only in the way he combines the profound and the propane.
And yet, you can always feel this baggage, this awareness of the great classics of Dreyer, Ozu and Bresson that influences Schrader’s work, who’s maybe one of the most astute America directors being able to address our doom-pilled global consciousness with a form of high modernist art that many directors have lost base with.
Think about it. What films are still able to transcend the limitations of their own medium and open up dimensions that go way beyond? In a time where we’re thinking of immersion in a purely technological sense, with IMAX cinematography, VR goggles and app-based user interfaces, we’re seemingly straying further away from the concept of film as art, as an object that opens new avenues beyond our current faculty of knowledge.
Luckily, Schrader comes to the rescue again because in the latest edition of his book Transcendental Style in Film, he prefaces his original text with a new essay called Rethinking Transcendental Style, in which he argues that it’s in fact the slow cinema movement, aligned with the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr that have taken over some of the inherent qualities of Transcendental style in the way the slowing of time, movement and the film image itself have opened up these otherwise closed of avenues.
Charting three paths for the artistic conception of cinema, Schrader composed a hilarious diagram in which he explores how film can set out from what he calls the narrative nucleus into a new artistic territory: there’s the ever observing type of film from the Surveillance Cam, the highly experimental territory of the Art Gallery and the seemingly kaleidoscopic area of The Mandala.
Somewhere between the Narrative Nucleus and the outer territories of the surveillance cam, the art gallery and the Mandala is the Tarkovsky Ring — truly one of the best critical inventions of the last years. It’s the demarcation line for where film’s are still consumed in a theatrical context, as opposed to a gallery, a niche film festival or a dedicated online streaming space.
Seriously google Schrader and The Tarkovsky Ring and marvel at what I think is a helpful and highly accurate piece of film criticism that haters could also see as astrology for film buffs.
All of this is a really convoluted way to set up a lovely talk with one of our favorite directors from the Netherlands called Viktor van der Valk. A director that is highly aware of the limitations of the frame and the imperative of the narrative nucleus has found some fascinating ways to try to bypass that in his incredible debut film Nocturne, which could be described as a happy marriage between Jean Luc Godard and Leos Carax.
A true cinephile as well, Viktor suggested that we talk about Transcendental style in film and mainly focus on a film by Bresson called Au Hasard Balthazar, which is a totally radical film in its own right, as it’s a 1966 black-and-white film in which the lead character is a donkey, who gets passed along from owner to owner in a rural village, experiencing the cruelty and sometimes mercy of human nature.
In the last year of elementary school, me and some of my friends got very much obsessed with watching horror movies. Despite our young age, the goal was always to watch the scariest thing we could possibly think of. In a previous episode of Celebrating Cinema I already talked in depth about my experience of seeing The Exorcist around that time. But now I’d like to take you back to the first time I saw Ringu, Hideo Nakata’s 1998 Japanese horror film that became somewhat of a viral hit in and outside of Japan.
I was over at a friend’s house for the first time ever. And was very much impressed by the relative loose parenting going on, resulting in a thick stack of rented horror dvd’s. I also remember listening to Queens of the Stone Age for the first time ever there, and being totally creeped out by the creaking violin that opens the album. Then my friend’s sister came in with a Cradle of Filth band shirt and blonde hair and black nails. I was already totally overwhelmed — and maybe a little bit in love…
Anyway, we started off with a very bad alligator slasher film and then we commenced with The Ring, a film that made a lasting impression on me. Of course, partially due to the supremely scary visuals of a young girl crawling out of a well and through the television screen into your own living room. Making it one of the first horror films that gave me the impression that I too, could be harmed by the evil depicted on screen.
But something else also lingered after watching the ring, a new region of cinema that I never encountered before in my life. Luckily this was the time of a serious Japanese Horror craze in the Netherlands. MTV broadcasted J-horror on their Asia Mania and Asian Screen late night series and later released some of these genre gems on DVD. Video rental stores were stocked with Japanese horror and American studio’s were eager to remake and rip off some of the most well-known titles for a local market. It was a great time to become acquainted with a subset of Japanese cinema.
Then, as a young, teenage cinephile, I started going to International Film Festival Rotterdam, where Asian cinema is often properly represented and Japanese directors like Takeshi Kitano and Takeshi Miike have a returning spot in the programming. With every new festival edition, films from Japan in my mind became more diverse, more expensive, more wild, but also less often tied to genre expectations.
It’s this getting rid of a specific notion of what Japanese cinema is or should be that opened me up to even more directors, films and periods of Japanese cinema. I remember fondly my first time watching an Akira Kurosawa film, Seven Samurai, on a way too small television set in my teenage bedroom. I also remember seeing films by Ozu in the local arthouse theatre as a tribute to one of my film professors at uni who tragically passed away on a way to early age. He always cried his eyes out during Late Spring, so we did too when we screened it in his remembrance. And then Miziguchi came after, and then Oshima, and most recently I’m obsessed with Ryusuke Hamaguchi, whose latest film Drive My Car, an almost transcendent adaptation of a Murakami short story, I was able to award with my film critic jury during the previous edition of the Cannes Film Festival.
Camera Japan, a small but dedicated festival for contemporary Japanese cinema, will soon grace the silver screen here in LAB111 but also in Rotterdam, to offer a selection of the latest Japanese films. Looking through the program I found another director that manages to somehow deliver on all of the things I’ve learned to appreciate about Japanese film. Kiyoshi Kurasawa, a wildly prolific auteur, who has made some of the finest genre films, next to some of the most piercing family drama’s you can imagine. The first film of Kurosawa that I saw was Pulse, in my opinion the film that Ringu could never be: a deeply disturbing look at growing solitude in a more “connected” world in which the ghosts of dead, lonely people are forever stuck on the internet. It eerily anticipates the Facebook memorial pages and online suicide note’s that have become a more macabre part of our social media networks. It also addresses how new media creeps into your life and alters your perception, sense of self and sense of reality.
It’s one of the best horror films I’ve ever seen. Not only for it’s visual thrills but especially because of it’s melancholic and contemplative outlook on life. It’s a triumph of a very diverse director who started out as a soft-core porn director of Pink Eiga films, climbed a bit up the ladder of prestige with detective/thriller/horror crossovers and eventually broke through with the more conceptual scares of Pulse. Tokyo Sonata is his Ozu for the modern age: a piercing and painful social drama about poverty, shame and depression, a film that plays everything very straight but has an undercurrent darker than most horror films could even fathom.
Soon to be screened during Camera Japan is his WWII intrigue drama Wife of a Spy, a high budget-ish historical thriller with some fascinating twists in a dense and layered plot. It’s another showcase for Kurosawa as one of the most interesting working Japanese directors right now. It was a deserving win of the Best Directing Prize at 2020s Venice Film Festival.
The fun thing about returning to the same festivals, like IFFR, is discovering even more about the boundless possibilities of cinema. I remember one year in Rotterdam where in WORM, one of my favourite venues ever, there was a night of Japanese Expanded cinema, an experimental and creative approach to film projection where the projector and screen are not unconditionally bound to each other. When you open up the possibilities of what projects and what receives the projections, you suddenly can create audiovisual experiences in seemingly endless possibilities. I remember a night of simultaneous, overlapping projecting, the use of laser lights, the use of Fans to rhythmically block and allow parts of film to reach the screen. I remember a lot of fun and surprise and shock in the audience that was in real time trying to figure out the inner mechanics of the form of projection they were witnessing. It all amounted to a sense of radical playfulness that transcends the need for linear stories or spectatorship often associated with the medium that we all love so dearly: film literally can become liberated.
I realise that with this Cold Open I’ve made a broad overview of what we could talk about, but that’s also because I don’t dare to try to limit or box in what film in general — and Japanese cinema in particular — is or should be. Instead I’d like to opt to go on a similar tour of discovery together, trying to find some of our own personal connections with the subject and try to inspire each other to discover more in the process.
For over 40 years, movie fans have eagerly awaited the arrival of the summer season, the time when some of Hollywood’s most vibrant and imaginative popular films emerge to battle out who will amass the biggest opening weekend. The nature of so called the “summer blockbuster,” as well as the time of release, has changed over the years, but most have been broadly appealing movies with a clever, easily understood concept. They have featured some of the most memorable action sequences, beloved characters, and enduring universes created in (mostly American) cinema. The memories of seeing the Dark Knight battle the Joker, a Tyrannosaurus walk the Earth again, and the high-speed flight down the Death Star’s trench will live forever in our minds. As will the sweet taste of copious amounts of popcorn and fizzy drinks.
Prior to the 1970s, the summer period was not particularly viewed as an ideal time to release a film, as many cinemagoers would be on holidays elsewhere. Through the 1950s and 1960s, studios would release their costly and therefore heavily promoted films in the last three months of the year. The term “blockbuster” had already been used to describe popular Hollywood releases since 1948 but was not associated with any particular time of the year. To make the crucial link between “blockbuster” and a release before July, something memorable would have to rise from the depths of the ocean…
With its release on June 20, 1975 in a then-massive 400 theaters and a ubiquitous marketing campaign based around its memorable poster, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws grossed over $400 million, becoming the first ‘summer blockbuster’. But it would take another film – one set in a galaxy far, far away – to prove to Hollywood that the age of the summer blockbuster had begun: George Lucas’ sci-fi epic Star Wars. Many connected to the film were quite skeptical of its potential for success, and the studio moved the film from its original Christmas 1976 release date to May 1977 because of production delays. The studio didn’t see the film as a major blockbuster and thought little of its franchise potential, infamously signing away many of its rights, including merchandising, to Lucas. Once Star Wars released to an incredible response by audiences and widespread support from film critics, the response to Star Wars changed the focus of Hollywood’s release schedule and the way they approached contract negotiations so as to emphasize securing the sequel rights to any film that went into production – and to NEVER give up merchandising rights! It was the success of Star Wars – and the possibilities of endless sequels and merchandising revenue – that spurred the development of many summer blockbusters over the course of the 1980s.
Spielberg would dominate the 80’s with both the Indiana Jones series and a certain endearing extra-terrestrial, but other franchises would also emerge with the cast of the original Star Trek series moving to the silver screen and the arrival of the Ghostbusters. But the biggest hit and game changer would emerge from the darkness of Gotham City. Tim Burton’s Batman convinced Hollywood that superhero films that took their source material seriously could become critical and popular successes and also generate massive profits through merchandise and tie-in sales. The same can be said for yet another from blockbuster maestro Spielberg, his 90’s dino-sized hit Jurassic Park. The 1993 classic would usher in an era of CGI-heavy summer blockbusters like Independence Day, Men In Black and the Star Wars prequels.
In the 2000’s Batman would return, no doubt due to Hollywood noticing the brand recognition potential of the cloaked vigilante. This time the comic book materials would be taken under the Batwing of Christopher Nolan in 2005’s Batman Begins, 2008’s The Dark Knight and 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises. The immense success of these films would not only kickstart the age of superhero summer blockbusters and the career of director Christopher Nolan, but it would also lead to the term ‘intelligent blockbuster’ being associated with the films of the British filmmaker (see: Inception, Interstellar and Tenet for other, not always as intelligent or successful, examples).
Merchandising, sequalization, brand recognition and franchise potential are key buzzwords in understanding the current climate of summer blockbusters. The seemingly endless stream of superheroes Marvel Studios has been tapping into since 2008’s Iron Man has given them a unique position in delivering box office sureshots, reaching its zenith in 2018 with Avengers: Endgame and its record-breaking worldwide opening of $1.2 billion
But only a few months after Endgame’s April 2019 release, the age of the blockbuster would come to a sudden, jarring halt. The COVID-19 pandemic would cause movie theaters to close and films such as Ghostbusters Afterlife, the new James Bond No Time To Die and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune were delayed for over a year. With all the tumultuous events of 2020, the concept of a “summer blockbuster” could only occasionally drift through our minds like some happy mirage from a pre-pandemic universe.
Meanwhile studios such as Disney and Warner Bros. have started experimenting with their release strategy, moving from a focus on releasing a film exclusively in theatres to simultaneously releasing said film on their streaming platforms or forgoing a theatrical release all together. Resulting in a mixed bag of, underperforming and sometimes easily forgotten, films like f.i. Marvel’s Black Widow, or the bizarrely enjoyable big budget Troma-inspired gore fest of The Suicide Squad. The question arises if the classic concept of the summer blockbuster can survive without the communal magic of the movie theatre. With solid blockbuster potential in the likes of Mission: Impossible 7, No Time To Die and Dune coming to theatres soon the upcoming period might decide the fate of how we interact with this particular brand of popular cinema.
Throughout my life, I have experienced passionate feelings towards the tomato. The tomato is a special fruit that may seem simple at a first glance, but as you think of her more, she turns out to be emblem of life and beyond.
The tomato is like family. Often sour, sweet at times, bitter when gone wrong and a combination of these flavors when done perfectly right. Tomatoes can be soft, wrinkly, squeezable, juicy and rotten. It is the all-encompassing fruit that represents all flavors and stages of life, different in every language. Depending on how I feel, the way I perceive the tomato differs. Sometimes she is a round red ball filled with tasteless water, sometimes (often), she is the holy fruit.
You may find this story unordinary and a bit out of place for a podcast about cinema, but I am going somewhere with this. My confession and coming out a tomato-phile is only because cinema has taught me that my intense love for the edible is shared by others. You might be familiar with a phenomenal film made in 1988 by Juzo Itami, called Tampopo.
Tampopo tells the story of two truck-drivers who stumble upon a struggling ramen-chef in Tokyo, who then end up having a collective mission to create the best ramen that the city has to offer. In their quest for the exquisite, the trio stumbles upon many figures who feel as passionately about food as I do. We meet the housewife who rises from her deathbed to cook her final meal for her family, a young gangster and his girlfriend who explore all erotic possibilities with food, and a gang of vagabonds who know how to cook proper French cuisine like no Frenchman does.
I am a student at the film academy, and one of my teachers recently said to me: “a good scene is like a sun-dried tomato: dense, concentrated and filled with flavor.” If this is true, Tampopo can be considered the sun that dries the tomato. The film is juicy, bitter, mushy, creamy, romantic, candy-coated and quite spicy at times.
My love for food may be as big as my love for cinema. Both make me understand our basic human needs, our passions and our pain. It is when film and food are combined and strengthen one another, we reach a higher understanding of what the word delicious truly means.
In the darkness of a movie theatre we can pretend to be all alone with the bright figures on the screen. These people might seem ordinary, dressed in ordinary clothes. Yet they are not ordinary. They move smoothly and without effort, their bodies are weightless. These humans are elevated humans, approaching perfection, and we long to be with them. In the darkness, we can imagine we are with them, at least for the duration of the movie. Cinema offers a distinctly erotic experience. Imagine how the first movie audiences must have felt, sitting in the dark, watching those moving images for the very first time. How exciting it must have been for people that were used to looking at paintings and plays, circuses and carnivals, photography and pornography. None of these spectacles stir as much desire in a person as the movies do.
And yet, there has always been a difference in the way we, the audience, view men and women. Whether you identify as a man or a woman, and whatever sexual preference you may have, most movies have, since the very beginning of Hollywood and its international counterparts, encouraged you to view the world through the eyes of the male, heterosexual protagonist. In other words, you are encouraged to desire women and to identify with men. Which means that whatever happens in the story, the woman is a passive character and the man an active one.
Film journalist Jessica Kiang writes about this disbalance in a collection of essays about female desire and film called She Found It at the Movies: ‘[quote]Within those men’s lusty, id-driven narratives, the women who show up are almost always there “to-be-somethinged”: looked-at; rescued; decoded; denuded; mistrusted; relied on; adored; despised; idealised; castignated; won; lost; unzipped by virtue of a magnetic watch; or smooshed in the face with a grapefruit. We are there to have things felt about us.[unquote]’
Of course this disbalance is problematic, and one of the ways to solve this problem is for heterosexual men in the movie industry to make room for other voices that focus on other perspectives. (Of course the same goes for racial disparities.) But there’s something else too – I think there’s an enormous erotic potential in restoring this balance.
Let me quote another writer who contributed to She Found It at the Movies. Sarah Elizabeth Adler writes about Grease and the erotic appeal of butch and femme lesbians she recognizes in “pink lady” Rizzo and “T-bird” Kenickie: ‘[quote]I loved watching [Kenickie] sit on the bleachers on the first day of school, legs splayed out, jeans cuffed. He’s smoking a cigarette and the next one is already tucked behind his ear. (Kenickie-ness, like butchness, is all in the details.) His shirt is light blue, cottony, a little boy’s colour under a leather jacket. You can see the crescent of his white socks over the edge of his mean black boots. The soft under the hard. Kind of like how, in the opening sequence, cartoon Rizzo wears a white bra with hearts – hearts! – under her black shirt. These details thrill me because I view eroticism as a matter of sacred contrasts: the difference between butches and femmes, the baby blue T-shirt under a black leather jacket, the difference between the hardness that someone shows to the world and the secret softness that lurks beneath.[unquote]’
I too believe that eroticism is to be found in balance. A precocious balance, or in other words: tension. Watching a man dominate a woman, or the other way around, is boring. But watching them find a balance is interesting. Looking and being looked at is part of this balance. We have looked at women endlessly, and we have looked at men looking at them. Now wouldn’t it be interesting to have these women look back? Or to let them tell you about what it is like for them to be looked at? Which is not just fair, or feminist – it’s hot.
One director who has always been interested in telling stories about what it is like to be looked at, and who turns those stories into gorgeous, sensual movies, is Sofia Coppola. She invites us into worlds that are filled to the brim with pastels and pink clouds, cakes and champagne, pretty faces and soft voices, sparkling diamonds and the finest clothing – only to show us how passive the women (and sometimes men) are that inhabit them. Her movies are melancholy, lighthearted, funny – and sensuous. And in The Beguiled, in which a wounded corporal is placed in front of a group of women of different ages, she not only tells a story about balance between the sexes, or actually a downright battle of the sexes, a power struggle – but she also shows us how to tell a story that is balanced out. The women desire this man, he desires them; we sympathize with all of them. This gaze is neither male or female; it’s just horny.